There are all sorts of surprises. Some of them came via this little calculator of Judy's. I didn't know about it until it was offered to me for free, normal price $20, but it has been on the market for several years! Yet when I happened to stumble upon it and think this is finally a calculator to my liking, it seems to be abandoned! I don''t #know# if the entire company is dead and gone, but at least the link to support is dead. This is really sad, I think, because in my mind that Ziff Davisaward was well deserved.

I enter the WindowsDeal Code required to ge the license, then I get the message:Problem: Maximum WindowsDeal licenses assigned under this promotion. You can still use the program in evaluation mode, and later purchase it if you like it.

^ wow! It has all the best from Judy's, but leaves out the geek stuff!

I think the choice of name (CalcTape) is really stupid, but maybe it makes sense to English speaking math students (no, word-speller, here it is math, not maths)? I would never find this application via Google, if I didn't already know the name!

CalcTape is a revolutionary new kind of pocket calculator. With CalcTape, also extensive calculations remain clearly structured. CalcTape makes the arithmetic process visible - you can generate intermediate results and subsequently correct or change all numbers and operations.

Actually I was using SpeQ for awhile on an old machine. It does all the normal stuff, calculations, plotting, etc but you type in the functions instead of clicking buttons. You can change a number up in the tape (or "sheet") and hit Enter to recalculate just that answer, or hit F5 to recalculate the whole sheet. Portable, or you can install it if you want a program item.

As a result of this discussion, I have updated my notes on $FREE calculators. I have given a summary below - for those as may be interested: (the text with the relevant links is copied below the summary)

ESBCalc Pro Scientific Calculator $19USESBCalc Pro Suite $55 US includes the 5 Calculators below, (5 x $19 = $95, thus saves $40) as well as new Calculators as they are added.

ESB Calc Pro Suite - this provides all the ESB Calculators and Unit Conversion Utilities at a bargain price. When buying the suite you get licenses to all the calculators - currently ESBCalc Pro, ESBProgCalc Pro, ESBFinCalc Pro, ESBDateCalc Pro and ESBUnitConv Pro - plus you get additional calculators as they are added to the suite.

You only need to register once - all upgrades are free for the life of the product.

-ESB

-they cannot quite make up their minds if there should be a space or not; is it ESBCalc or ESB Calc...

Also includes Floating Decimal Point, Lakh Formatting, Paper Trail Comments and many other enhancements to the User Interface and Calculator Engine. You can also do Descriptive Statistics, Days between Dates, Degrees/Minutes/Seconds entering, Hexadecimal/Decimal Conversions and Fraction/Decimal Conversions.

For those who don't like Precedence of Operators, that can also be turned off as ESBCalc Pro is highly configurable.

Wow, at least from the screenshots that looks very handy. And as for "power under the hood"... I didn't even know there were different kinds of modulus. He suggests that an easy alternative to using the "+" (shift + "=") symbol is to simply press the "#" key - not sure what keyboard layout makes that easier. I poked around the site to see if I could guess, but all I found was that the author is a really eclectic, interesting person. He's got a program that converts any picture to sound, for example.

I'm not sure how many licenses OpalCalc is going to sell at $15, though, even with evangelists such as yourself.

I tried to figure out why this would be - I found an answer in the British keyboard: Shift+3 gives you £ - a necessary character there, and so an extra key was added, making the enter key smaller, to still have #. In German it looks like Shift+3 gives you § . Not sure what use they have for that, seems like a € would be more useful.

Wish I would have had knowledge of this in my college algebra class! And it looks like it will even load modules/programs designed for TI calculators as well.All versions are freeware so I don't know why IainB left it off his list, though. There's nothing out there like this & it sure beats buying one of those expensive TI calculators.

OpalCalc looks brilliant. I would never use it enough to justify buying it, but I'm glad it's available *and* it is $5 cheaper than the program listed in the OP.

@Innuendo : I didn't consider (or claim) my list to be comprehensive at all. However, Wabbitemu is now on my list as I downloaded and installed it just now!

@x16wda: Thanks for the link to Wabbitemu. I empathise with you regarding the ability of schoolchildren to lose their new school calculators. Being a collector (and constructor) of calculators from way back, I had already acquired an assortment of several good used ones (discarded/free), which I cleaned up and overhauled and got working tickety-boo. I kept 2 of the fx type for when my daughter would need them, and now she does, and today it transpired that she seems to have already "misplaced" one of them, so is using the 2nd as a backup. I have given most of the the rest to a local charity mission shop that I regularly take stuff to (from dumpster diving and people giving things to me as they know I collect for charity).

So, I haven't bought a calculator in years, though I did buy two of the superb Texas Instruments "Little Professor" educational math drilling calculators a couple of years back. They were very difficult to locate, but I finally managed to source them from nearby Australia. They get their power from ambient light and have an LCD display, but I would have preferred the older - now obsolete - battery-driven versions which had a red LED display. I reckon they were probably a more visually stimulating and fun design for kids.

I rarely evangelise -- I am told often enough that my taste in software is "a bit weird" that I certainly wouldn't want to insist that a particular thing is best. But the traditional calculator, however good they are (and my experiences of the things goes back to the 1970s and I still own several) is specifically designed to be finger-friendly in a relatively restricted space -- something that computerised calculator programs don't, it seems to me, need to emulate.

I tried a couple of the wabbitemu TI emulations and was thoroughly impressed with the quality of them -- and I completely get that a smartphone host for one of them would be a good idea. The restricted space and keyboard facilities apply again, so it makes sense.

For me, Opalcalc sits nicely between the input complexity of the calculator (infix or postfix? Do I start with a number and apply a trig function to it, or start with the function as if I were writing the formula on paper? How do I get at the stats functions again?) and the big iron of the fullblown spreadsheet, and it needs me to have a full-size keyboard I can use with it without having to grope for symbols.

And some of the things it can do would need Google, otherwise. How many days to Christmas? (@ 25 dec 2015 - @ today as whole days) What's $15 in euro? ($15 as euro) How many centimetres in 12 fathoms? (12 fathoms as cm)

And the developer is still tinkering with it, and that $15 is a lifetime license. Personally, I think it's worth every cent. But then, I'm a bit weird.

For me, Opalcalc sits nicely between the input complexity of the calculator (infix or postfix? Do I start with a number and apply a trig function to it, or start with the function as if I were writing the formula on paper? How do I get at the stats functions again?) and the big iron of the fullblown spreadsheet, and it needs me to have a full-size keyboard I can use with it without having to grope for symbols.

And some of the things it can do would need Google, otherwise. How many days to Christmas? (@ 25 dec 2015 - @ today as whole days) What's $15 in euro? ($15 as euro) How many centimetres in 12 fathoms? (12 fathoms as cm)

ESBCalc™ v7.3.1 zip download - ESBCalc is a Freeware Scientific Calculator for Windows with Infix Notation, Brackets, Scientific Functions (Trigonometric, Hyperbolic, Logarithmic - including Base 10, Base 2 & Natural - plus more), Memory, Paper Trail, Result History List and more. Includes Prefix Function support so that Log (1.3) can be entered as log 1.3 rather than as 1.3 log which is also available if you prefer that behaviour. The current state of Precedence, Prefix Functions, etc can be displayed at startup to help avoid confusion.